Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Last night my wife and I got to do an Ulduar 10-man raid. It was the first time we were able to raid together for any length of time since we had our baby, and...it was probably a bad idea. Distractions + one-handed raiding (and not in the good way) led to a lot of unnecessary wipes and poor performance.

Also: the trash to XT was a really pleasant surprise, especially since you can not pull them until after XT loses his heart the first time. Oops. Patch notes can occasionally save your life. :)

But that's not about the meat of this post. We did Kologarn, and after wiping a bunch we finally managed to get the bastard down.

I wasn't thinking about it much, and it wasn't that much of an upgrade over my Favor of the Dragon Queen, right? Plus I'm not raiding full time right now, so I'd rather not get a bunch of gear that others will be able to use for progression. The other tank (our normal raid leader) expressed interest, and I told him it was okay but not the best for me, and to go ahead and take it.

Except...that basically is the best in slot at this time. Sure, you could go for the Bronze Pendant, but any other tank should get it before you do and it wouldn't be that big an upgrade. It's essentially equivalent to Boundless Ambition in most ways. Which means that if you have Boundless, don't really bother getting this...

But if you don't, you should probably pick this up.

Which is what I actually wrote in the previous gearing article for Ulduar.

And it was a sidegrade to the warrior too. So I just passed up essentially the BiS neck piece because I can't remember what I wrote.

I'll have other opportunities to get it, and it's still not that big a deal one way or another, but man do I feel like a dumbass.

6 comments:

Peter
said...

Hahaha well I should actually read your gearing posts myself before rolling on 25man loot. I read it a while back. Then we kill Razor last night. The wrists drop. I roll on them and win and nobody else rolls. Not too much competition for leather but anyway... Then I check your loot lists an hour later, because the stats aren't that much better. And what do I find? You say the exact same thing: dont bother rolliing on these gloves, there's bound to be something better later on :( That'll teach me to waste my hard won dkp on random new loot.

Still I did pick up a twisted visage a bit later. Except again, that was messy. Our damn hunter felt he had a right to roll on it too, forcing me to spend a lot more than I would have liked. That's probably something I should get clear on with my guild.

I guess I'll stick moongoose on it. So far at least, I havent *needed* the extra stamina or armor of OON. Of course for every new boss I'll start with it, but then we find that keeping the druid bear alive is not the hard part of the encounter.

You know the worst thing about progression? It totally messes with the nice cleancut look of your dungeon set. I'm all over the place now; looking like I picked up my mismatched gear from various garage sales around the country.

Got the furious leather belt last night (from voa) so I'm starting to feel less upset about pvp gear being so good. I do feel kind of dirty tbh, having all the resiliance and hardly any attack power. pvp gear also looks so ugly. I think in the end, I go with the RP element of gear, over the theorycraft. Technically, its better for progression and I'll use it for a while; but when I can swap it out for pve gear I will do that. If we're desparate in some hardmode 3 months from now, I'll get it out of the bank.

So, stats are improving week by week - pushing 47k buffed atm, and that's with a fairly mixed setup of agility/stam/hit/expertise. As more of us get geared up, I think we'll be able to evaluate itemization much better.

I also realized that Blizzard dont *owe* us good set bonuses, or new weapon enchants, or even a new tanking idol. What they owe us is a great & doable raiding experience, and that's what we get. Like everyone, I want a new enchant, and a new idol, perfect pve gear, updated druid forms etc etc, from one month to the next. But I'm convinced I dont actually *need* them.

Well I'm sorry I don't really know where to post it but as a like the way you treat every aspect of bear tanking, I'm interest to know your opinion on Blood Draining enchant. Personnaly after looking at some WWS of my guild (a warrior has got this enchant on his new weapon), the enchant didn't seem very helpful and I still think mangoose is better.

ThinkTank bio

About Me

Kalon likes playing tanks, no matter how hard he tries to fight it. He is not as hardcore as many but spends a lot of time thinking about WoW, and randomly rants about it now and then. He played formerly on the Argent Dawn (EU) server and was a founding member of Fire and Blood (Quel'Dorei) before joining Casually Serious, a guild devoted to hard core progression on only 8 hours of raiding time a week.
He is a devoted husband, father, and when he has the time programs software.